Wood Group GTS Power Plant Services group serves
simple cycle power plants, cogeneration facilities, and combined
heat and power centers. With 25 years of experience and expertise in
both operating power plants and overhauling and maintaining rotating
equipment, the company helps enhance the operational performance and
system reliability of their customers’ power generation assets
through turbine maintenance solutions that minimize downtime,
increase turbo-machinery availability and reduce the overall
operating costs.

The Challenge

Since 2003, GTS Power Plant Services has been
providing market leading operations and maintenance, repair, and
overhaul services to companies all over the world. The company is
under Gas Turbine Services, one of three companies within Wood
Group, an international energy services company with $5 billion in
revenues. An organization of such size and on an international scale
must maintain consistent standards across all of its companies to
ensure smooth operations and secure business practices. GTS Power
Plant Services must adhere to the strict internal audit standards
required of all Wood Group companies.

Wood Group internal audit requirements included
segregation of duties and system permissions by job function. The
company also needed to be able to review specific data and reports.

GTS Power Plant Services had to implement measures
to meet these strict requirements very quickly—without disrupting
business operations. GTS Power Plant Services has been successfully
using Microsoft Dynamics NAV for five years for accounting,
operations, procurement, and IS. Approximately 100 employees use the
software in various capacities, requiring different levels and types
of permissions, depending on job function and responsibility.
Because it can be challenging to discern where conflicts in job
responsibilities might occur, requiring duties to be segregated, the
company wanted to use a role-based model for this function. Also,
because each power plant is set up as a different company in NAV,
employees also have different permissions by company.

It would be possible to set up, report, and manage
security within NAV, but Antoine Geffriaud, Manager of ERP Systems
and Development, and Steve Kersch, Program Manager, ERP Projects,
came to the conclusion that, based on the complexity of the
company’s needs, a tool specifically designed for working with
segregation of duties and system permissions was the best approach.

Antoine and Steve looked at several of these
tools. “We found them to be complex, ‘heavy,’ unable to integrate
well with NAV, and expensive,” said Antione. So they approached
their Microsoft Partner,
SCS, to discuss their needs. SCS
recommended NAV Easy Security for Microsoft Dynamics NAV by
Mergetool.com, a solution that allows companies to easily and
quickly set up their own security, set permissions for logins, and
build roles. The product also has a Role Center for maintaining
security, providing one centralized location to manage permissions.

The Solution

Antoine and Steve contacted Per Mogensen, owner of
Mergetool.com and developer of NAV Easy Security for a demonstration
of the product. After seeing the product in action, they were sold.
“When I saw it, I said, Viola! Here’s our solution. Let’s get with
it,” said Steve. “It was so starkly different and functionally
enabled…it was light years ahead.”

NAV Easy Security makes it quick and easy for
companies to assign permissions for multiple users across multiple
groups and companies by automating much of the process, saving
valuable time and money—and freeing up IT resources for other
important projects.

Antoine and Steve were impressed with the
recording tool. Permissions can be recorded when building new roles
or updating existing roles. Every record, codeunit, form, report,
table, security level that needs to be accessed is automatically
recorded by the client monitor. Tasks can then be combined to build
roles, which are assigned to appropriate users. These roles can be
assigned to multiple users, and roles can be adjusted as necessary
so the tasks in common with other roles don’t have to be
re-recorded.

Because NAV Easy Security does not modify any of
the base objects within NAV, it required no customizations and was
very simple to integrate into the company’s NAV solution, even with
their existing customizations to the base code.

Antoine and Steve were also pleased that NAV Easy
Security requires very little training, and setup is wizard-driven,
making it faster for them to meet corporate requirements.

Other features of NAV Easy Security include:

Source Code Analyzer -
Permissions required by the source code can be read and any
necessary changes added automatically to build roles or role
permissions manually added.

Automated Object-Level Security –
The complex, time-consuming task of setting up form-level,
report-level and page-level security for users is automated through
object-level permissions in the roles, allowing easy viewing of
which object access by user. NAV Easy Security also automatically
maintains permissions for the remainder of the objects.

Restore Points - Changes to
permissions can be reversed very easily should any problems arise.

Export and import features -
Restore Points, Recordings, and Built Roles can be exported and
imported, allowing for testing in one database and an easy move to
production. NAV Easy Security also works with both the RoleTailored
Client and the Classic Client in NAV (Recording permissions requires
the Client Monitor, available only in the Classic Client in versions
of Dynamics NAV 2009).

The Results

Once the company decided to purchase NAV Easy
Security, Mergetool.com went on-site and provided training. After
only 3 hours of training and “a couple of hours follow up 2 days
later,” the Power Plant Services team was able to take over
recording and defining of roles. They started with the finance team
and were extremely pleased with the process.

“From the date of purchase, it took only 14 days
to get the first users up and running on their new roles,” said
Antoine. “This process would otherwise have taken months.”

The time to set up a role manually could
take up to 2 hours, but with NAV Easy Security, it takes 5 minutes,
and 90-95% of the tasks were accurate after only one recording.

On the experience of working with Mergetool.com,
Antoine said, “It was great. They were very helpful, very
available…which was key in the implementation. They even came out
here to train us personally.”

So what’s next for GTS Power Plant Services? The
company plans to upgrade to the Role Tailored version of NAV 2009
and is happy that NAV Easy Security will evolve with their NAV
solution.

About Mergetool.com

Mergetool.com focuses on delivering services,
tools, and products to enhance the performance of Microsoft Dynamics
NAV (formerly known as Navision). For more information, visit us at
www.mergetool.com.

About NAV Easy Security

NAV Easy Security for Microsoft Dynamics NAV makes
it quick and easy to assign permissions for multiple users across
multiple groups and companies—saving you valuable time, money, and
resources when setting up security. For more information, visit
www.naveasysecurity.com.